Blast-em: A very open video game

Blast-em: A very open video game

Today, Byron Atkinson-Jones releases his latest game Blast-em. It’s a good old fashioned side scrolling shootemup with a pulsating soundtrack by @gharrisonsounds Gavin Harrison – if you’re old enough to have had an Amiga or ST you’ll love it, and if not you should go find out what you’ve missed out on, have a look here.

Apart from flying through space and blasting anything that moves there’s two really interesting things about the release: Byron is giving you the option to buy the source code and letting you see how many he’s sold!

A game’s source code and the amount it’s sold are two things that are usually kept under lock and key. They are both incredibly useful to someone starting making games and writing software in general.

A great way to start learning how to do something is to start with a finished product you can take apart, break and put it back together to see how it works. For example, this is how we learn about music, we start with the sheet music (source code) by accomplished composers, see which parts make the melody which parts make the rhythm. We can then fiddle around with it and make new versions. This is how I invented Axel G 😉

Byron has turned the release of a game into a learning experience for students of video game development and it’s a wonderful thing. Byron has suggested he might run a daily blog on the development of his next game, a Pac-man inspired so hopefully we can show that too.